In our English Methods class (EDCI 747) we were asked to create a podcast about a literacy event in our lives. For mine, I chose my first experience reading Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway—a trans indigenous poet from Ontario. (You can find her bio here ). Holy Wild is a collection of poems about identity, discrimination, pain, love, and sexuality. My podcast focused on Benaway’s poem “Boys” which illustrates the narrator’s coming into her body and starting a journey of self-love after long years of abuse and denying herself agency over her identity.

The process took a long time. For a 26 minute podcast, I probably spent about three hours recording, maybe another hour or so scripting, and another hour or two editing. I recorded the audio clips in GarageBand, segmenting the script into manageable chunks of about 10 to 20 seconds. It’s incredibly hard to speak without making mistakes for a longer period of time.  GarageBand has a mixing station, and several other neat tricks you can play around with.

After recording, I had to edit the sound files. This required a different program, as I had several GarageBand files to keep the segments manageable, and unfortunately the interface does not allow for combining files (or at least as far as I could figure out). Instead, I transferred the files to Audacity. After experiencing some technical difficulties (it wouldn’t accept the file extension), I ended up finishing the project with Reaper.

It was certainly a learning experience, but I really enjoyed the project. It helped me to think about what educational merits the poem had, and answer the question of why I wanted to teach it. You can listen to the podcast here.